Colin Neale has patented a novel device aimed at improving air flow over the back end of a car.
This is the second in a two-part series about retired auto designer Colin Neale. Click here to read part one, which looks back on Neale’s long career designing the cars we drive.
Automotive designers have gotten really good at designing cars that barely tickle the air as it slips past the front end and caresses the sides and greenhouse. But when that same air gets to the back end, well, there’s not a whole lot for a designer to do.
“Everything just goes to hell” at the back end of the car, said retired auto designer Colin Neale. “It’s called turbulence.”
Neale says for a car to have perfect tail-end aerodynamics, it would have to be a 100-long teardrop.
Since 100-foot long cars aren’t practical, Neale has come up with an idea that might work instead. Neale obtained a patent for what he calls S.C.O.T. – or Spin Control of Turbulence – that might offer a solution.
Neale's S.C.O.T. device would condition the turbulent air is it slips over the rear end of the car.
First conceived in 2004, Neale’s idea is to attach freewheeling turbines to the C-pillars – the pillar between the rear doors and the back window – to condition the air as it goes over the back of the car.
“The proposal is to generate this intervention by having freewheeling fan assemblies so positioned that they may be activated by consistent high-speed airflow, so ducted and directed that they pour spinning airstreams into the turbulence,” Neale, 84, wrote in the introduction of his proposal.
Initially, the fan housings could be retrofitted to existing vehicles, but could also be incorporated seamlessly into the greenhouses of new designs.
Even if they are simply attached to existing models, Neale thinks car buyers would accept them.
“People are used to add-ons of all kinds,” Neale said, pointing to pictures in his proposal showing wings, scoops and oversized lights attached to a variety of cars.
So far, Neale’s idea is little more than a hypothesis. He’s had a prototype of his fan and housing built and he attached it to a Chrysler LHS for some crude tests. About all those tests demonstrated was that the fan could generate powerful airstreams.
To find out if the idea has merit, Neale would like to see a government agency fund a wind tunnel study. Another possibility would be an academic institution doing tests on the concept.
Of course every automaker these days is looking for ways to generate electrical power, from regenerative braking to solar panels. Could Neale’s S.C.O.T. fans be used as generators? Neale said he’s thought about that, but wants to focus on bringing some discipline to that unruly air turbulence first.
Neale, a former designer for Ford, Chrysler, Ritter-Smith and Magna International, is no stranger to patent generation. In fact, he was awarded 18 patents, mostly for seating systems while he was at Magna, the last company he worked for, before retiring when he was 80.
He tried to offer his air management proposal to Ford, but ended up with little more than frustration as he tried to make his way through the tangled bureaucracy of the giant automaker. That he was offering it to an automaker where he worked for a significant number of years seems to have mattered little.
Does the idea have merit? Neale would like to find out.
Neale can be reached at colingneale@gmail.com